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Week of Oct. 30 in Teacher Ed News

GLOBALThe Guardian. Your child’s teacher could soon be an undergraduate on £3.50 an hourFifteen years ago when Teach First began, the training programme that carefully selected graduates to train on the job, the teaching unions went ballistic because children were to be taught by teachers who had degrees but had not yet completed their teacher training. Now parents in England could find their child’s teacher is a first-year undergraduate on terrifyingly low wages.

International Society for Music Education. The Music Educator and Policy: Bystander or Participant?Literature on collaborative practice, teacher leaders, school/community-level activism, induction and teacher education are pointing out how ineffectual and disempowering traditional models of policy action have been… Places as distinct as Finland, Brazil or the United States are seeing the pendulum shift back, away from high centralisation and enforcement of draconian accountability models.

Center for American Progress (CAP). The Progressive Case for Charter SchoolsSeveral high-quality networks, such as High Tech High, KIPP, and Uncommon Schools, are pioneering an effort to recruit and train alumni interested in becoming teachers. [rebuttal below from Truthout]

Hechinger Report. Mississippi schools use online resources, technology to expand course offerings The Global Teaching Project, an initiative aimed at providing high-quality content to promising students, and the Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access have launched a three-year pilot program to bring college-level AP courses to schools that lack certified teachers and course offerings.

Inside Higher Ed.
1) Free Community College Picks Up Steam “The best part of free college is that it has the potential to have this big marketing impact,” said Judy Scott Clayton, an associate professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
2) Green Light for Competency-Based Teacher EdAdvocates for competency-based learning, and for new approaches to teacher education, can chalk up another victory: the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education approved the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning’s application to become a degree-granting graduate institution.

The Atlantic. The Crisis Facing America’s Preschool TeachersEfforts to fill centers with better qualified early-childhood workers are threatening the jobs of those who can’t afford to get their college degree, and some states are turning to apprenticeships to solve both problems at once.

Truthout. There Is No “Progressive Case” for Charter SchoolsThat CAP authors choose to spotlight Teach for America as an “exemplary” practitioner of teacher recruitment is laughable. While the organization has of late gotten some notoriety for recruiting higher percentages of black and Latino teachers, a national study of TFA found more than half of TFA recruits placed in low-income schools leave after two years, and by their fifth year, only 14.8 percent continue to teach in the same low-income schools they were originally assigned to. [rebuttal to CAP piece]